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MICHAEL CHALLEN’S CHILDHOOD DREAM was to be an environmental scientist.

After two years of studying botany and zoology, when his marks were all over the place – from top to bottom – he heeded his mum’s advice and enrolled in art school instead. After three months’ tuition, when the teachers started asking him for technical drawing tips, he dropped out, built a yacht and sailed it to Bali. 

It wasn’t until Michael hit the ripe old age of 24 that he thought he’d better get serious about a career, so he bought a van, packed it with canvases and oil paints, and headed into the Western Australian bush with only his two dogs for company. It started a life-long meditation of sorts where he sits, often for days on end, capturing the unique essence of the surrounding landscape on canvas. 

Today, he is one of Australia’s most celebrated oil painters and one of the most hard-working, known for bringing remote landscapes to life on the canvas with intimacy, peace, strength and soul. For the past 20 years he’s called the Sunshine Coast home and currently lives in Peregian with his partner, Mary Jo Pont, also an artist, and loves spending time with his two boys, aged six and nine, from his first marriage.

Ask Michael what he believes is the most significant landscape in the country and he’ll nominate the Kimberleys in Western Australia. But stand in front of any one of his small or large-scale works and you’ll feel the same way about the scene before you, whether it’s a painting of the Western Arthur Range in south-west Tasmania; Ormiston Gorge in the Northern Territory; or the Sunshine Coast’s very own Mt Coolum. 

Michael paints every day (punctuated with long bike rides to rest his eyes), primarily because he loves to but also because his pieces are in serious demand, largely as commissions from Western Australia where he lived from age three (he was born in Newcastle, NSW). 

His works are in prestigious private and corporate collections in Australia and abroad, including the Holmes à Court collection and in former WA Premier Brian Burke’s home. Michael exhibits in only two locations in Australia – Perth in Western Australia and on the Sunshine Coast at Buderim’s Tiffany Jones Fine Art Gallery, where he enjoys a happy working relationship with the Jones family. 

“I’ve got my mum to thank for my career because I’d never thought of becoming an artist before she suggested it,” Michael says. “I was always drawing, but I didn’t think I was very talented.” 

While his first painting sold for a paltry $100 in 1979, by his fourth exhibition he was selling out before the paintings were on the walls and the price tags now run from $5000 to his largest commission at $200,000. 

Michael gives one of his signature warm chuckles as he says most Sunshine Coast locals think he is a landscape gardener. Apparently, he often gets requests to transform gardens and courtyards. Admittedly, he has a sign on his car that reads: ‘Challen Landscapes’, so it’s little surprise people are confused.

The sign harks back to 2003, when Michael returned from a six-year stint travelling around the country, painting breathtaking landscapes. Splashed across his four-wheel drive was the original sign with the words: ‘Land and Light: Australian Landscapes of the Millennium by Michael Challen’.

The purpose of the car sign and the long adventure was to complete a series of 80 oil paintings that influential business people, artists and curators had commissioned Michael to capture of their favourite Australian landscapes. The pieces were then to become part of a nationwide travelling exhibition to share Australia’s natural beauty.

The collection pre-sold for nearly $1milllion as art lovers in every state jumped at the chance to own a rare Michael Challen piece. 

Today, only half the sign remains on the car.

Michael’s focus for 2009 and beyond is to embark upon a new series capturing the essence of his spiritual and emotional experiences.

“I’ve been an artist all my life and there’s so little art I’ve seen that captures this spiritual side of our being,” he says. “We’re a very analytical, left-brain thinking civilisation and I think we’ve lost a bit of our spirit. There have always been people who have searched for it and kept it alive because it’s within everybody. I know my market will be much narrower for these types of works, but that’s fine.

“It’s not about the money or fame. It’s about being successful on the canvas and making yourself happy; which inevitably helps other people.”

Michael knows he is a success when he looks at the canvas and it does what he thinks all art should do, “that is, the painting should talk to me and I should be able to talk back to it. The dialogue should make me move, whether emotionally, mentally or spiritually; it should take me into another world.” 

He admits that not every painting does this for him. For example, his current work in progress of the Bungle Bungles in Purnululu National Park, West Australia, is making him feel quite the failure. 

“I’m still trying to work out what makes the Bungle Bungles that landscape; what is its essence,” he says. “I just can’t put my finger on it. There’s something there – it’s so ageless and impenetrable, so extraordinary and so deep.”

Michael explains it’s the fourth painting he’s tried to master of the beehive sandstone fortress. 

“That’s the aim for every person; to be true to themselves, to express what is real and to trust and believe the pursuit is worthwhile and significant.”  

Michael Challen’s work can be found at Tiffany Jones Fine Art Gallery, 138 Burnett St, cnr Townsend Rd, Buderim. 5450 1722. www.tiffanyjonesfineart.com.au